A collaborative research project to evaluate and provide sustainable recommendations for our digital preservation programmes

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DPOC: 1 year on

Oxford’s Outreach & Training Fellow, Sarah, reflects on how the first year of the DPOC project has gone and looks forward to the big year ahead.

A lot can happen in a year.

A project can finally get a name, a website can launch and a year of auditing can finally reach completion. It has been a long year of lessons and finding things for the Oxford DPOC team.

While project DR@CO and PADLOC never got off the ground, we got the DPOC Project. And with it has come a better understanding of our digital preservation practices at Bodleian Libraries. We’re starting year two with plenty of informed ideas that will lead to roadmaps for implementation and a business case to help continue to move Oxford forward with a digital preservation programme.

Auditing our collections

For the past year, Fellows have been auditing the many collections. The Policy and Planning Fellow spent nearly 6 months tracking down the digitized content of Bodleian Libraries across tape storage and many legacy websites. There was more to be found on hard drives under desks, on network drives and CDs. What Edith found was 20 years of digitized images at Bodleian Libraries. From that came a roadmap and recommendations to improve storage, access and workflows. Changes have already been made to the digitization workflow (we use jpylyzer now instead of jhove) and more changes are in progress.

James, the Technical Fellow at Oxford, has been looking at validating and characterising the TIFFs we have stored on tape, especially the half a million TIFFs from the Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project. There were not only some challenges to recovering the files from tape to disk for the characterisation and validating process, but there was issue with customising the output from JHOVE in XML. James did find a workaround to getting the outputs into a reporting tool for assessment in the end, but not without plenty of trial and error. However, we’re learning more about our digitized collections (and the preservation challenges facing them) and during year 2 we’ll be writing more about that as we continue to roadmap our future digital preservation work.

Auditing our skills

I spoke to a lot of staff and ran an online survey to understand the training needs of Bodleian Libraries. It is clear that we need to develop a strong awareness about digital preservation and its fundamental importance to the long-term accessibility of our digital collections. We also need to create a strong shared language in order to have these important discussions; this is important when we are coming together from several different disciplines, each with a different language. As a result, some training has begun in order to get staff thinking about the risks surrounding the digital content we use every day, in order to later translate it into our collections. The training and skills gaps identified from the surveys done in year 1 will continue to inform the training work coming in year 2.

What is planned for year 2?

Now that we have a clearer picture of where we are and what challenges are facing us, we’ve been putting together roadmaps and risk registers. This is allowing us to look at what implementation work we can do in the next year to set us up for the work of the next 3, 5, 10, and 15 years. There are technical implementations we have placed into a roadmap to address the major risks highlighted in our risk register. This work is hopefully going to include things like implementing PREMIS metadata and file format validation. This work will prepare us for future preservation planning.

We also have a training programme roadmap and implementation timeline. While not all of the training can be completed in year 2 of the DPOC project, a start can be made and materials prepared for a future training programme. This includes developing a training roadmap to support the technical implementations roadmap and the overall digital preservation roadmap.

There is also the first draft of our digital preservation policy to workshop with key stakeholders and develop into a final draft. There are roles and responsibilities to review and key stakeholders to work with if we want to make sustainable changes to our existing workflows.

Ultimately, what we are working towards is an organisational change. We want more people to think about digital preservation in their work. We are putting forward sustainable recommendations to help develop an ongoing digital preservation programme. There is still a lot a work ahead of us — well beyond the final year of this project — but we are hoping that what we have started will keep going even after the project reaches completion.